Orpheus and Eurydice

Don’t look back, whatever you do. Don’t. Look. Back. That was the one rule that Lord Hades and Persephone imposed, the one that he would have to follow if he had a chance to get Eurydice back. He looked on resolutely, attempting to resist the temptation pulling at the edge of his eye, to numb himself to the burning curiosity and horror his mind conjured for him. What if she wasn’t following him, if she never loved him at all? Those doubts wormed into his mind and every one of his muscles tensed, making him stumble as he worked his way through the river weeds. What was even worse, he thought bitterly, is that these thoughts were entirely of his own making. No Fury had come to whisper treachery in his ear, no delirium plagued his senses, no arrow was being pressed to his heart. He was the one that doubted what formed the basis of his life, his journey, his muse. Him, the eternal skeptic, never able to partake in the bliss that was ignorance. As a young boy, Orpheus did nothing but look back. Look back longingly as he left the house to be ridiculed and berated. Look back over his shoulders with the shaky paranoia of a man too used to being prey. Look back at the sea as he tried not to doubt every move. He took a deep breath and tried to define his dreams into something tangible, something past nebulous hopes. Be accepted. Be happy. Make Eurydice happy. Get Eurydice back. Don’t look back. It all boiled down to that, in the end. When he was a child; don’t flinch, when he was an adolescent, don’t regret, as an adult, don’t look back. 

All variations on the same rule.

Orpheus was tired of being told not to look anywhere but the Fates’ dark and pitiless eyes. He was tired of people shoving and hammering down, trying to mould him, stretch and manipulate him. Eurydice was the only one who loved him for who he was, painfully shy and often just lost or dazed in the heat of the moment. Maybe the thought of understanding was what brought him all the way here to the pits of the underworld. If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was fail to follow rules. That, and sing. The siren, they called him. Deceptive and ‘other’ yet alluring all the same. And unmanly, eventually to be slayed by the hero, pure melody stained and slowly gargling to an end choked with blood. 

He stared, hard, at the light that began to seep through the entrance to the Underworld, mostly blocked by a huge three-headed dog. As he squinted, it gave a low growl and shifted on its feet a little. This was unreal, the type that gnawed at his stomach in an uncertain and hopeful unease. No one escaped the underworld, no one. The gods didn’t take pity, didn’t allow their rules to be broken. Everyone in Greece feared divine retribution, kings and peasants on their knees in humility and thinly veiled fear, faces pale. The gods were merciless. The gods were inhuman. They demanded respect, looking down on the people. They toyed with and threw away human lives like spoilt children, mirth twisting their features as they bashed figures against each other, grotesque scene pinching the corners of their mouths, laughing in a gilded palace far from the victims of their games. That’s what the gnawing voice told him: he would never get out alive. If they had made a lapse in judgement, doubting the extent of mortal’s desperation under a rule they had never been forced to submit to, under their own. If they thought he wouldn’t turn back, they would simply force him to. After all, the gods were infallible, and so was their illusion. Just another cautionary tale to add to the list, another show to make the others believe in their benevolence. As the horror dawned and a grim resigned outlook began to tinge his senses with grey, he walked faster. Then he ran, like a suicidal idiot. Ran to and from death. He could imagine the exact moment Hades, watching from his throne, saw that the pretense was up, the mouse had begun to run, too much to the sadistic pleasure of the cat. It’s no fun without a chase, after all. It’s no fun if they get away. He could imagine the glee of the creatures that began to claw their way up from the river Styx pasted on their master’s face. Today, he would lose his muse, and himself. Still, he didn’t break the rule. 

At the verge of death, so close to success, so  far from his family, his pressures, his obligations and his dignity, he still followed the rules. Their rules. When he died he would be under their control forever, if he wasn’t already. What to do now but turn against everything he had ever done in this life in his moment of fiery passion, defy the gods, doom himself to Tartarus forever, and stare into the jaws of death? What left to do but finally look past the bars of his crude cage and forsake himself? 

What left to do but turn back?

Orpheus still had some sort of vague hope, sparking and starting and dying; but at the very moment he turned, he knew she wasn’t there. He wondered if he would be allowed to leave; thinking of the long queue of judgement, the uncertainty, the verdict. A bitterness tinged with a hint of despair and self loathing lanced through his chest and he let out a choked gasp, as if the arrow of his actions had only just caught up pierced his heart. There was a reason the gods were feared. It didn’t end at death. Minos could condemn him; he knew, yet was numb to the reality of it. It was more of a distance between his soul and body, a thick layer of glass, ice that sealed the wound with a resigned sigh. The gavel would ring out in the moody silence, strike the wood for the sins, grievances, successes and failures of the people again and again. It would stretch on and on, and Orpheus found he feared eternity more than any end. His long and deft fingers curled into his palms and he shifted his weight, exhaling in contemplation. He thought he had lost that streak of fiery defiance somewhere along the way. Most of his life, he felt like he’d been dunked in freezing cold water. Gasping for breath, flailing in shock, slow and sluggish but wild-eyed as he tried to get back up, to tease the air into his lungs. The sound of the gavel against wood: a steady beat of sins, of the passing of human life, of their life-changing decisions and of their tiny ones. He had barely reached the shore; just to throw it all away. That was what his life was; a story that repeated itself far too often.

He should've known better.